Hitler's peace

Pereira showed him where Thornton Cole’s body was hidden, and for a moment White stared at the corpse with something close to fascination. He had never before seen a dead body, and in the darkness Cole looked hardly dead at all.

“Come on,” urged Pereira. “Do whatever the fuck you’re going to do and let’s get out of here.”

“All right.” He pocketed the money from Cole’s wallet and tossed it on the ground beside the body. Then he took a book of matches and a ticket from Rigg’s Turkish Bath on Fifteenth and G Streets from his own vest pocket and slipped them into Cole’s pockets. The matchbook was from a private club in Glover Park and, like the Turkish bath, was well-known to the police as a haunt of Washington’s homosexual community.

Bending over the body, he undid Cole’s fly buttons.

“What the hell are you doing?” hissed Pereira.

“Just keep a look out and shut up.” White pulled the dead man’s penis out of his pants. “I know what I’m doing. This kind of thing happens all the time, believe me. And I already told you about the reputation of this park. By the time I’ve finished here, this is going to be one investigation they’re going to want to keep very quiet.” White undid his own fly buttons. The way he saw it, Thornton Cole’s murder was going to make the Sumner Welles scandal look like a Sunday school picnic.

Taking out his own penis, he began to masturbate.

The OSS occupied a complex of four redbrick buildings at 2430 E Street, on the corner of Twenty-third Street and the Foggy Bottom bank of the Potomac River. When the OSS had moved into the E Street building, they discovered two dozen monkeys-medical research subjects-that the National Institutes of Health had left behind, and this had prompted Radio Berlin to remark that FDR had a team working for him that included fifty professors, twenty monkeys, and a staff of Jewish scribblers.

At the time I didn’t think the Germans were so very far from the truth. I was impressed that they should have known as much about the OSS as evidently they did. Especially the bit about the monkeys.

Further along E Street a brewery lent the air a strong, pungent smell that prompted me to remember all that was sour in my life. I was one of Roosevelt’s Jewish scribblers. The only trouble was I felt like one of the monkeys. A monkey deprived of a tree to swing in and without a banana.

I had tried telephoning Diana on a number of occasions but her maid, Bessie, said she wouldn’t take my calls. Once, in an effort to trick her into coming to the phone, I even pretended to be one of her decorating clients, but by then Bessie was easily able to recognize my voice. Her friends avoided me, too, as if I had caused her some hurt, and not the other way around. Soon, I took to driving by her house in Chevy Chase at all hours of the day and night, but Diana’s car was never there. What made things worse was that she still hadn’t given me any kind of explanation for her behavior to me. The injustice of what had happened seemed almost as hard to bear as the heartache. My situation began to feel hopeless. But there seemed to be nothing else that I could do for the moment and, after all, there was still a war on. I had a job to do.

In fact it wasn’t much of a job. I wished that when Allen Dulles had gone off to Switzerland to head up the OSS office in Berne, I had gone with him. But for a fever, I might have. Instead of which I remained behind in Washington, distracted by memories of Diana, and chafing under the leadership of Donovan’s number two, Otto Doering.

Now that my report on the Katyn Forest massacre had been turned in to the president, I had settled back to my original job. I was spending some of my time devising a plan for finding the German spy who had reported on the existence of those twenty monkeys. I was sure he was based in Washington, and I had planted a number of false facts with several different local organizations before carefully monitoring which of these was reported on Radio Berlin or appeared in a speech by some leading Nazi. So far, I had narrowed the search to someone in the War Department.

Some of my time was spent compiling personal data on the leading figures in the Third Reich. This could be very personal indeed, such as the rumor that SD chief Walter Schellenberg was screwing the widow of his old boss, Reinhard Heydrich; or that Heinrich Himmler was obsessed with spiritualism; and what exactly had happened after Hitler had been treated for hysterical blindness by a psychiatrist at a military hospital in 1918.

But most of the time I worked on setting up an American-supported German resistance movement. Unfortunately it had turned out that several members of this popular front were German Communists, and this had brought them, and to some extent me, under the scrutiny of the FBI. So when two mugs wearing cheap shiny suits and carrying short-barreled. 38s where their hearts ought to have been presented themselves in front of my desk that Monday afternoon, I assumed the worst.